Thanks Tony for posting this.
I was quite bemused by the SWO (NZ) position and Grant Morgan's post on the
NZ activist list, which you forwarded to the Marxism List.
Morgan and the SWO have an interesting history. They are old-time
Stalinists - for over 70 years they were the CPNZ. The CPNZ was one of the
most ultra-Stalinist groups in the world. During the Sino-Soviet split,
they went with peking. During the China-Albania split, they went with
Albania. When the Albanian Staliist regime collapsed, Morgan's group said
it was overthrown by a counter-revolutionary Trotskyite coup.
Morgan's adult life was spent denouncing' Trotskyites' as
counter-revolutionary agents of the CIA and Fascism.
However, after Albania 'fell', the poor old CPNZ faced a crisis of where
the hell to go to. There was always Shining Path, but I guess they figured
lining up with non-English speaking Stalinists hadn't served them all that
well, so they looked around the Trot movement for whatever English-speaking
group semmed to be the largest and hooked up with the British SWP. If some
other group had'vebeen bigger, they owuld have hooked up with them.
The next thing you know, they re-appear denouncing their beloved Stalin and
embracing TonyCliffThought. Having said for decades that Stalin's Russia
was communist, they now declared it to have been 'state capitalist'. Which
kind of suggests that Morgan and co. can't tell the difference between
communism and capitalism.
Having spent its entire existence blindly following dictates from abroad,
the SWO - described by some on the left here as the Stalinist Workers
Organisation - not surprisingly sides automatically with the Mother Ship in
London.
In the early 90s a separate IS group emerged in NZ, based in Dunedin and
fused with Morgan and his fellow Stalinists. Abut a year later, most of
the Dunedin people left, declaring the Morgan group to be still Stalinist
at heart. The British SWP leadership cabal sided with Morgan and the old
CPNZ crew. Now Morgan and co. are repaying the debt, by siding with the
London cabal against the American ISO.
Philip Ferguson